Factors Influencing Career Choice Amongst Undergraduate Students in Selangor

Abstract

Undergraduate students remain as a major source of the labour market in Malaysia. Nevertheless, failures in workforce planning could jeopardise Malaysia's development and progress. Hence, the main objective of this study was to investigate factors influencing career choice amongst undergraduate students. Besides, this research paper helps as a stepping stone for developing a career guidance model that would assist higher education institutions lecturers in their endeavours to educate undergraduate students to make career choices from a well-informed perspective. Survey research which was mainly quantitative studies in nature was used in this research paper. The cross-sectional survey design was adopted whereby questionnaires with several 28 questions including demographic information and a sample of 159 undergraduate students were used for further analysis in this study. Furthermore, only higher education institutions of university status were included in this study because the university runs their own programmes. To sum up, the target population of this study consists of undergraduate students from 4 public higher education institutions and 2 private higher education institutions which are the National University of Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia, International Islamic University Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Multimedia University, and Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman. This study's conceptual framework is made up of five independent variables which are Salary and Benefits, Personal Interest, Parents, Social Media, and Selfefficacy based on literature review. On the other hand, the dependent variable is career choice'. The Statistical Package for the Social Science Window software Version 21 was used to assist in analysing the data that were collected. Reliability Analysis was carried out first to assess the reliability and consistency of the constructs where Cronbach alpha was used as the indicator. A Descriptive Research strategy was then applied to obtain primary data from the target research population, which were undergraduate university students, through the use of a questionnaire survey. Therefore, it can be concluded that the values in skewness and kurtosis were important in identifying any outliers from the normality. Finally, Multiple Regression Analysis was also conducted, and the model summary was discussed in the study. The results indicated that Social Media is not supported in the relationship with the Career Choice while Salary and Benefits, Personal Interest, Parents, and Self-efficacy are supported in the relationship with the Career Choice. In a nutshell, the findings are considered inputs to the university's management in the development of career guidance and counselling services for undergraduate students as a way to assist them in making the right choice for their desired career. This study might also reckon Ministry of Human Resource Malaysia in understanding how undergraduate students perceive the various factors that may influence their career choice so that new policies regarding hiring and recruitment systems can be constructed and regulated accordingly.